Monday, March 19, 2012

Spring is here in two hours. Spring cleaning officially starts in two hours. Do you share a household with others? Do those of the household not share an equal level of desire to maintain an orderly and clean environment?

Whether a husband and wife or roommates, sharing this responsibility can be a challenging task. How do you peaceful resolve the differences? One option:the envelope. How much would it cost to have a cleaning service come in weekly and keep the home in a 'guest-ready' state?

Each of you contribute proportionally to the envelope. Each of you record your contribution to the clean environment for the past week. If the effort has been equally shared then divide the contents of envelope equally back to all of you. Somewhat lopsided? You get that percentage of the envelope that equates to your percentage of exerted work. No one worked at it - you have the budget collected to hire out.

Either way, the "envelope" method helps for everyone to feel fair about how much effort they contribute and the household stays orderly. Budgeting the work and budgeting the pay helps everyone feel compensated for extra effort and the house stays organized. Try this one at home and let us know how it plays out.

Friday, March 9, 2012

We filed our taxes this week. The picture on the wall of our tax preparer’s office included the quote: “When the first 1% income tax rate was being debated in 1913, a U.S. Senator opposed to it stated, "If they get away with 1% today, some day it may be raised to as high as 5%!" How lovely would it be today to be capped at 5%? We would even be excited to cap at a certain ex-governor’s 15% if fairly distributed to all tax payers, whether their earnings were by way of nursing a patient bedside or from long-term capital gains.

We know that paying taxes is our legal obligation. And we believe it is a social responsibility to pay taxes to support the common good – our roads, street lights, schools, libraries, fire fighters, and so on. But it is a bit painful to see all in one lump sum the amount of our ‘giving’ to the government for the past year.

In the words of Scottish whisky distiller Lord Thomas R. Dewar (1864–1930) “The only thing that hurts more than paying an income tax is not having to pay an income tax.” Even though the unemployment rate is moving in the right direction, there are still too many unemployed and underemployed and we know we should be grateful that we have income for which to tax. But darn, how fun would it be if the tax rate would be capped at 15% for all?